Green Daily

I have long believed bringing my own reusable bags to the store --- any store --- is a no brainer. And then I deal with the puzzled cashiers. Perfectly nice people who stick all my purchases into a plastic bag and then into my ecobag. Retaining my sense of humor and decorum becomes challenging. Take a look around a store --- any store --- and watch how many people wander out with one or two items in their plastic bags. I wish it weren't so, but I think we're gonna have to ban the plastic menaces, or at least charge 25 cents each to get people to pay attention. All the hand-wringing by people who "reuse" these flimsy bags is overblown. I doubt they ever truly reuse all the bags they've got. It's just resistance to change that scares them.

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I don't know what I would do without those store bags. I reuse them completely--hardly have enough of them. Before my dog died, I used the smaller ones that are provided for produce to pick up after her. I line my waste-baskets, and my garbage pails with the larger ones. Really large ones from retail stores get used when i need to carry something somewhere when it's raining. I use them for picnic food in the summer, and my daughter often uses one to take something home that I no longer use and that she needs.
I'm old enough to remember when we did not have plastic bags (or anything plastic) and we did manage. As is usually the case, convenience and sanitation are the driving forces. (We did use more paper bags, but that means losing more trees, and paper is not waterproof.)
I sometimes wonder whether, many, many years from now, would that plastic (considered indestruct-able) might turn out to be something of value--per-haps reverting to some sort of petroleum. Just a pipe dream, I guess, but it's not impossible.

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I just recently finally bought some reusable bags. The Albertsons where I shop started selling them for $1 a piece. Although I do use the plastic ones to line my bathroom garbage cans, it is only a small issue that I guess I will have to deal with when I run out of the ones I currently have saved up for this purpose. Even if I do eventually have to purchase some liners, the Albertsons I shop at also gives you 4 cents back for every one of their reusable bags used every time you shop (a nice little extra bonus I found out that is unadvertised). So the bags will pay for themselves fairly quickly and future "profits" might go toward purchasing can liners.

Although in typing this comment an idea has just come to me. If you are feeling "adventurous" I suppose you could just raid the plastic bag recycling bin at the store and re-purpose those bags as can liners.

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If more folks would compost their wet garbage, we'd have less need for can liners and therefore less need for plastic bags, whether made from petroleum or bio-materials. It's not hard to compost. We live in an apartment and use an Urban Compost Tumbler out on our deck. Others in apartments use worm bins or bokashi. People with yards have it even easier. And people who live in areas with city-wide food waste compost collection have it the easiest of all.

We use one 3-gallon BioBag every two or three weeks. That's it. Everything else gets composted or recycled. And if it weren't for my sweet husband, we'd have even less garbage going to the landfill.

Beth
http://www.fakeplasticfish.com

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OMG we soooooooooo should ban them. All you would ever need to do is drive down the road. I see them in trees, in fields, in shrubbery, in the weeds. I dont have to even go a mile and i can find one. I hope they ban them forever. People need to take responsibility and since some will not. Why not ban them? I can see nothing but good come from it!

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I feel that a possible solution to this problem would be to charge consumers for each bag they need at the store. By doing this it would force consumers to use less of them and definitely reuse the bags that they had to "buy". Better yet, it would make us buy and use the cloth and reuseable bags. I think that charging 10 cents for each plastic one could work. I know alot of people cannot possibly reuse all the plastic bags they get. These bags then get thrown in the regular trash since they cannot be recycled in my city. The waste from this is tremendous and we cannot continue this! We must think about our children and grandchildren's future....and do our part to save the environment now.

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